Something in the Head

Something in the Head: The Life & Work of John BroderickÊby Madeline Kingston \n \nThis is the first full biography of Athlone-born writer John Broderick (1924-89), whose powerful Balzacian novels of life in the Irish midlands depict sexuality and Catholicism in a series of pungent tableaux and portraits drawn from vivid but entrapped lives. \n \nSon of a prosperous baker, the solitude of his childhood (compounded by boarding-school), an enveloping mother, homosexuality and alcoholism fuelled his fictions, from The Pilgrimage (1961) to An Apology for Roses (1973) and The Trial of Father Dillingham (1982). Self-exiled to Bath in England with his housekeeper during the 1970s, he became an astringent commentator on the rapidly shifting mores of the Irish scene. \n \nA neglected but powerful writer, his work complements that of his rival Edna O'Brien and holds up a mirror to an Ireland of the mid-twentieth century like no other novelist of his day. His writings, now celebrated in annual John Broderick Weekends instituted by the Athlone Rotary Club in 1999, are of increasing relevance and interest, and introduce a new generation of readers to this skilled scourge of Irish society, for whom life was 'something in the head, and almost never in the body'. \n \nTwo of his early novels, The Pilgrimage and The Waking of Willie Ryan, are being reissued by The Lilliput Press in tandem with this book. \n \nABOUT THE AUTHOR \n \nMADELINE KINGSTON was born in County Fermanagh and graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1967. Postgraduate study of the French writer Julien Green led her to her subject. This is her first book. Read more here.